Plog

3 seppää, originally uploaded by Masivaan.

A historically significant statue of 3 naked blacksmiths, in the very heart of Helsinki. Erected in the early 1930′s, survived the bombings in the Continuation War (although you can see some shrapnel marks on it), and a number of banal jokes about the nudity of the blacksmiths (if you think about it, its the most comfortable way of working in a surely high-temperature environment, in fact, if I was a blacksmith I would only work on the nude), it’s one of the most well known sights in Helsinki today. To the left of the statue you can see the largest department store in Scandinavia, Stockmann, which also houses the largest book-store in Scandinavia.

The light trails are from a tram (3T) passing by from Aleksanterinkatu to Mannerheimintie, both major historical streets in Helsinki, and the former also represented as the official Christmas street since 1947.

For the photo I mounted the camera on a tripod, took it right next to the statue with the sigma 10-20 at 10mm. I used a small aperture – f/16 – to make the lights more prominent and to allow the 15 second exposure to capture the light trails into the picture. Post processing was done in PS3, where I added a regular unsharp mask (120%, 0.6, 0), a high pass filter layer at 80% opacity – I usually use a 5.0 radius for the high pass filter, but mainly because I’m quite uncertain of what it does technically, and different sources usually recommend values of 1 or 10.